Will a new Tate display, dusting off the era's portraits, ease our troubled
relationship with the Edwardians, asks Alastair Smart?

Ah, the Edwardian age. That halcyon era of opulence, luxuriance and Lord Grantham’s balls. When the gents wore boaters, the ladies twirled parasols and all of Britain basked in a long, sunlit afternoon… before the shattering reality-check of the First World War.

This, at least, is our romanticised view today of the years 1901-14. The reality, of course, was rather different. Britannia may have ruled the waves but, at home, the Suffragettes, trade unionists and Irish Home Rulers proved frightfully militant.

Not that there are clues to such turbulence in Edwardian art, most of which is so staid and academic it reinforces our stereotype of an untroubled, complacent age. One thinks of John Singer Sargent’s portraits of well-to-do toffs such as Lord Ribblesdale and duchesses draped in the diamonds newly arriving from De Beers mines in South Africa. As Henry James put it, “The taste for art in England is at bottom a fashion… not an outgush of productive power.”

Posterity has been rather harsh on Edwardian paintings, with many of those in the national collection being packed off to provincial galleries. Others, such as those that the Tate has dusted off for its new display, Forgotten Faces, were simply consigned to storerooms.

Tastes change, of course, but it’s remarkable how many of these “forgotten” pictures were considered masterpieces 100 years ago. Take Charles Wellington Furse’s Diana of the Uplands (1903) – of the painter’s satin-gowned wife straining to keep her hat on, while walking her greyhounds on a windy hillside. This was once considered one of the treasures of the Tate, right up there with Millais’s Ophelia and appearing beside Turner’s Fighting Temeraire on a Board of Education list of artworks every schoolchild must know.

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Ambrose McEvoy’s The Ear-Ring (1911), meanwhile, was such a hit at a 1938 Louvre show of British painting that it attracted even more attention than the Constables and Gainsboroughs.

Visitors to Forgotten Faces shouldn’t feel guilty if its artists’ names are unfamiliar. That’s precisely the point. Emil Fuchs, anyone? No, I thought not. Yet Fuchs was once so popular, he was the only artist given access to the deceased Queen Victoria as she lay in state.

There were, of course, some British artists pushing boundaries – notably, the Camden Town Group – but Edwardian art is characterised by the orthodoxy of suavely brushed, drawing-room portraiture. One reason it has fallen so spectacularly from grace is our awareness of the Modernist advances that the Fauves (in Paris) and Expressionists (in Berlin) were making at the same time – and embarrassment at how parochial British art was by comparison.

Another reason, perhaps, is that for all our superficial nostalgia for the era, we don’t feel entirely comfortable celebrating a society so frivolous and class-ridden (especially in today’s straitened times). Gerald Kelly’s portrait of Somerset Maugham is particularly hard to like: painted – before a coromandel screen and Burmese cabinet – simply to celebrate the writer’s purchase of a new hat.

In many ways, the “forgotten faces” represent a rogues gallery, of subjects (and artists) sentenced to oblivion. And, despite the brief period of parole at Tate Britain currently, one can’t really envisage a long-term release.